So, there was that erotic thing, which I was pretty ashamed of at the time, and _of course_ knew that I must never, ever tell a single soul about. (It would have been about three years since the fantasy started that I even worked up the bravery to [tell my Diary about it](/ancillary/diary/53/#first-agp-confession).)
-But within a couple years, I also developed this beautiful pure sacred self-identity thing that would persist indefinitely, where I started having a lot of _non_-sexual thoughts about being female. Just—little day-to-day thoughts, little symbolic gestures.
+<a id="beautiful-pure-sacred-self-identity"></a>But within a couple years, I also developed this beautiful pure sacred self-identity thing that would persist indefinitely, where I started having a lot of _non_-sexual thoughts about being female. Just—little day-to-day thoughts, little symbolic gestures.
Like when I would [write in my pocket notebook in the persona of my female analogue](/images/crossdreaming_notebook_samples.png).
Or when it was time to order sheets to fit on the dorm beds at the University in Santa Cruz, and I deliberately picked out the pink-with-flowers design on principle.
-Or how I was proud to be the kind of guy who bought Julia Serano's _Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity_ when it was new in 2007, and [who would rather read from Evelyn Fox Keller's _Reflections on Gender and Science_ than watch Super Bowl XLII](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2013/03/tradition/).
+<a id="whipping-girl"></a>Or how I was proud to be the kind of guy who bought Julia Serano's _Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity_ when it was new in 2007, and [who would rather read from Evelyn Fox Keller's _Reflections on Gender and Science_ than watch Super Bowl XLII](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2013/03/tradition/).
-Or how, at University, I tried to go by my [first-and-middle-initials](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_literary_initials) because I wanted a gender-neutral [byline](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byline), and I wanted what people called me in real life to be the same as my byline—even if, obviously, I didn't expect people to not-notice which sex I am in real life because _that would be crazy_.
+<a id="literary-initials"></a>Or how, at University, I tried to go by my [first-and-middle-initials](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_literary_initials) because I wanted a gender-neutral [byline](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byline), and I wanted what people called me in real life to be the same as my byline—even if, obviously, I didn't expect people to not-notice which sex I am in real life because _that would be crazy_.
-(This attempted nickname change actually turned out to be a terrible idea that ended up causing me a huge amount of pointless identity-crisis psychological pain—my particular pair of real-life initials never really "felt like a name" even to me (as contrasted to something like "C.J.", which feels like a name because it has a _J_ in it); I turned out to be incredibly uncomfortable with different people knowing me by different names, and didn't have the guts to nag everyone in my life to switch for something that didn't feel like a name even to me; _and_ the "gender-neutral byline" rationale almost certainly never held up in practice because my real-life first initial is a [high-Scrabble-score letter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrabble_letter_distributions#English) that begins one popular boy name and zero popular girl names. But it was the _principle!_)
+(This attempted nickname change actually turned out to be a terrible idea that ended up causing me a huge amount of pointless identity-crisis psychological pain—my particular pair of real-life initials never really "felt like a name" even to me (as contrasted to something like "C.J." or "J.T.", which [feel like a name on account of having a _J_ in them](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/initial-conditions)); I turned out to be incredibly uncomfortable with different people knowing me by different names, and didn't have the guts to nag everyone in my life to switch for something that didn't feel like a name even to me; _and_ the "gender-neutral byline" rationale almost certainly never held up in practice because my real-life first initial is a [high-Scrabble-score letter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrabble_letter_distributions#English) that begins one popular boy name and zero popular girl names. But it was the _principle!_)
Or how I stopped getting haircuts and grew my beautiful–beautiful ponytail. (This turned out to be a great idea and I wish I had thought of it sooner.)
[It was while browsing _Wikipedia_ in 2006 that I encountered the obvious and perfect word for my thing](/2017/Feb/a-beacon-through-the-darkness-or-getting-it-right-the-first-time/)—_autogynephilia_, from the Greek for "[love of](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/-philia) [oneself as](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/auto-#English) [a woman](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/gyno-)." I was actually surprised that it turned out to have been coined in the context of a theory (by clinical sexual psychologist Ray Blanchard) that it was the root cause of one of two types of male-to-female transsexualism.
-You see, a very important feature of my gender-related thinking at the time was that I was growing very passionate about—well, in retrospect I call it _psychological-sex-differences denialism_, but at the time I called it _antisexism_. Where sometimes people in the culture would make claims about how women and men are psychologically different, and of course I knew this was _bad and wrong_. Therefore the very idea of transsexualism was somewhat suspect insofar as it necessarily depends on the idea that women and men are psychologically different (in order for it to be possible to be in the "wrong" body). I once [haughtily told my Diary that "I would never do 'drag,' because that represents a mockery"](/ancillary/diary/141/#never-do-drag). (Same rationale as why blackface is offensive.)
+<a id="antisexism"></a>You see, a very important feature of my gender-related thinking at the time was that I was growing very passionate about—well, in retrospect I call it _psychological-sex-differences denialism_, but at the time I called it _antisexism_. Where sometimes people in the culture would make claims about how women and men are psychologically different, and of course I knew this was _bad and wrong_. Therefore the very idea of transsexualism was somewhat suspect insofar as it necessarily depends on the idea that women and men are psychologically different (in order for it to be possible to be in the "wrong" body). I once [haughtily told my Diary that "I would never do 'drag,' because that represents a mockery"](/ancillary/diary/141/#never-do-drag). (Same rationale as why blackface is offensive.)
So while I was certainly glad to learn that _there's a word for it_, an obvious and perfect word for _my thing_, I mostly just stole the word (whose referent and meaning I thought was self-explanatory from the common Greek roots) without paying any further attention to this Blanchard theory or the idea that _I_ might somehow be transgender.
From the perspective of axiomatic antisexism that I held at the time, this assertion is cringe-inducing. Of course most people are straight, but is it not all the _same love_?
-I wasn't ready to hear it then, but—I mean, probably not? So, for the _most_ part, all humans are extremely similar: [as Yudkowsky would soon write about](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Cyj6wQLW6SeF6aGLy/the-psychological-unity-of-humankind) [(following Leda Cosmides and John Tooby)](https://www.cep.ucsb.edu/papers/pfc92.pdf), complex functional adaptations have to be species-universal in order to not get scrambled during meiosis. As a toy example, if some organelle gets assembled from ten genes, those ten alleles _all_ have to be nearly universal in the population—if each only had a frequency of 0.9, then the probability of getting them all right would only be 0.9<sup>10</sup> ≈ 0.349. If allele H [epistatically](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistasis) only confers a fitness advantage when allele G at some other locus is already present, then G has to already be well on its way to fixation in order for there to be appreciable selective pressure for H. Evolution, feeding on variation, uses it up. Complicated functionality that requires multiple genes working in concert can only accrete gradually as each individual piece reaches fixation in the entire population, resulting in an intricate species-universal _design_: just about everyone has 206 bones, two lungs, a liver, a visual cortex, _&c_.
+I wasn't ready to hear it then, but—I mean, probably not? So, for the _most_ part, all humans are extremely similar: [as Yudkowsky would soon write about](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Cyj6wQLW6SeF6aGLy/the-psychological-unity-of-humankind) [(following Leda Cosmides and John Tooby)](https://www.cep.ucsb.edu/papers/pfc92.pdf), complex functional adaptations have to be species-universal in order to not get scrambled during meiosis. As a toy example, if some organelle gets assembled from ten genes, those ten alleles _all_ have to be nearly universal in the population—if each only had a frequency of 0.9, then the probability of getting them all right would only be 0.9<sup>10</sup> ≈ 0.349. If allele H [epistatically](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistasis) only confers a fitness advantage when allele G at some other locus is already present, then G has to already be well on its way to fixation in order for there to be appreciable selective pressure for H. Evolution, feeding on variation, uses it up. Complicated functionality that requires multiple genes working in concert [can only accrete gradually](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ZyNak8F6WXjuEbWWc/the-wonder-of-evolution) as each individual piece reaches fixation in the entire population, resulting in an intricate species-universal _design_: just about everyone has 206 bones, two lungs, a liver, a visual cortex, _&c_.
In this way (contrary to the uninformed suspicions of those still faithful to the blank slate), evolutionary psychology actually turns out to be impressively antiracist discipline: maybe individual humans can differ in small ways like personality, or [ancestry-groups in small ways](/2020/Apr/book-review-human-diversity/#ancestries) like skin color, but these are, and _have_ to be, "shallow" low-complexity variations on the same basic human design; new _complex_ functionality would require speciation.
I guess if you _didn't_ grow up with a quasi-religious fervor for psychological sex differences denialism, this whole theoretical line of argument about evolutionary psychology doesn't seem world-shatteringly impactful?—maybe it just looks like supplementary Science Details brushed over some basic facts of human existence that everyone knows. But if you _have_ built your identity around [quasi-religious _denial_](/2020/Apr/peering-through-reverent-fingers/) of certain basic facts of human existence that everyone knows (if not everyone [knows that they know](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CqyJzDZWvGhhFJ7dY/belief-in-belief)), getting forced out of it by sufficient weight of Science Details [can be a pretty rough experience](https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/XM9SwdBGn8ATf8kq3/c/comment/Zv5mrMThBkkjDAqv9).
-My hair-trigger antisexism was sort of lurking in the background of some of my comments while the Sequences were being published (though, again, it wasn't relevant to _most_ posts, which were just about cool math and science stuff that had no avenue whatsoever for being corrupted by gender politics). The term "social justice warrior" wasn't yet popular, but I definitely had a SJW-alike mindset (nurtured from my time lurking the feminist blogosphere) of being preoccupied with the badness and wrongness of people who are wrong and bad (_i.e._, sexist), rather than trying to maximize the accuracy of my probabilistic predictions.
+<a id="hair-trigger-antisexism"></a>My hair-trigger antisexism was sort of lurking in the background of some of my comments while the Sequences were being published (though, again, it wasn't relevant to _most_ posts, which were just about cool math and science stuff that had no avenue whatsoever for being corrupted by gender politics). The term "social justice warrior" wasn't yet popular, but I definitely had a SJW-alike mindset (nurtured from my time lurking the feminist blogosphere) of being preoccupied with the badness and wrongness of people who are wrong and bad (_i.e._, sexist), rather than trying to maximize the accuracy of my probabilistic predictions.
Another one of the little song-fragments I wrote in my head a few years earlier (which I mention for its being representative of my attitude at the time, rather than it being notable in itself), concerned an advice columnist, [Amy Alkon](http://www.advicegoddess.com/), syndicated in the _Contra Costa Times_ of my youth, who would sometimes give dating advice based on a pop-evopsych account of psychological sex differences—the usual fare about women seeking commitment and men seeking youth and beauty. My song went—
Another post in this vein that had a huge impact on me was ["Changing Emotions"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QZs4vkC7cbyjL9XA9/changing-emotions). As an illustration of how [the hope for radical human enhancement is fraught with](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/EQkELCGiGQwvrrp3L/growing-up-is-hard) technical difficulties, Yudkowsky sketches a picture of just how difficult an actual male-to-female sex change would be.
-It would be hard to overstate how much of an impact this post had on me. I've previously linked it on [this](/2016/Nov/reply-to-ozy-on-two-type-mtf-taxonomy/#changing-emotions-link) [blog](/2017/Jan/the-line-in-the-sand-or-my-slippery-slope-anchoring-action-plan/#changing-emotions-link) [five](/2018/Apr/reply-to-the-unit-of-caring-on-adult-human-females/#changing-emotions-link) [different](/2018/Dec/untitled-metablogging-26-december-2018/#changing-emotions-link) [times](/2019/Aug/the-social-construction-of-reality-and-the-sheer-goddamned-pointlessness-of-reason/#changing-emotions-link). In June 2008, half a year before it was published, I encountered the [2004 Extropians mailing list post](http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/2004-September/008924.html) that the blog post had clearly been revised from. (The fact that I was trawling through old mailing list archives searching for Yudkowsky content that I hadn't already read, tells you something about what a fanboy I am—if, um, you hadn't already noticed.) I immediately wrote to a friend: "[...] I cannot adequately talk about my feelings. Am I shocked, liberated, relieved, scared, angry, amused?"
+It would be hard to overstate how much of an impact this post had on me. I've previously linked it on [this](/2016/Nov/reply-to-ozy-on-two-type-mtf-taxonomy/#changing-emotions-link) [blog](/2017/Jan/the-line-in-the-sand-or-my-slippery-slope-anchoring-action-plan/#changing-emotions-link) [five](/2018/Apr/reply-to-the-unit-of-caring-on-adult-human-females/#changing-emotions-link) [different](/2018/Dec/untitled-metablogging-26-december-2018/#changing-emotions-link) [times](/2019/Aug/the-social-construction-of-reality-and-the-sheer-goddamned-pointlessness-of-reason/#changing-emotions-link). In June 2008, half a year before it was published, I encountered the [2004 Extropians mailing list post](https://archive.is/En6qW) that the blog post had clearly been revised from. (The fact that I was trawling through old mailing list archives searching for Yudkowsky content that I hadn't already read, tells you something about what a fanboy I am—if, um, you hadn't already noticed.) I immediately wrote to a friend: "[...] I cannot adequately talk about my feelings. Am I shocked, liberated, relieved, scared, angry, amused?"
-The argument goes: it might be easy to _imagine_ changing sex and refer to the idea in a short English sentence, but the real physical world has implementation details, and the implementation details aren't filled in by the short English sentence. The human body, including the brain, is an enormously complex integrated organism; there's no [plug-and-play](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plug_and_play) architecture by which you can just swap your brain into a new body and have everything Just Work without re-mapping the connections in your motor cortex. And even that's not _really_ a sex change, as far as the whole integrated system is concerned—
+<a id="changing-sex-is-hard"></a>The argument goes: it might be easy to _imagine_ changing sex and refer to the idea in a short English sentence, but the real physical world has implementation details, and the implementation details aren't filled in by the short English sentence. The human body, including the brain, is an enormously complex integrated organism; there's no [plug-and-play](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plug_and_play) architecture by which you can just swap your brain into a new body and have everything Just Work without re-mapping the connections in your motor cortex. And even that's not _really_ a sex change, as far as the whole integrated system is concerned—
> Remapping the connections from the remapped somatic areas to the pleasure center will ... give you a vagina-shaped penis, more or less. That doesn't make you a woman. You'd still be attracted to girls, and no, that would not make you a lesbian; it would make you a normal, masculine man wearing a female body like a suit of clothing.
>
From the standpoint of my secret erotic fantasy, "normal, masculine man wearing a female body like a suit of clothing" is actually a _great_ outcome—the _ideal_ outcome. Let me explain.
-The main plot of my secret erotic fantasy accommodates many frame stories, but I tend to prefer those that invoke the [literary genre of science](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4Bwr6s9dofvqPWakn/science-as-attire), and posit "technology" rather than "spells" or "potions" as the agent of transformation, even if it's all ultimately magic (where ["magic" is a term of art for anything you don't understand how to implement as a computer program](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/kpRSCH7ALLcb6ucWM/say-not-complexity)).
+<a id="secret-fantasy-frame-stories"></a>The main plot of my secret erotic fantasy accommodates many frame stories, but I tend to prefer those that invoke the [literary genre of science](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/4Bwr6s9dofvqPWakn/science-as-attire), and posit "technology" rather than "spells" or "potions" as the agent of transformation, even if it's all ultimately magic (where ["magic" is a term of art for anything you don't understand how to implement as a computer program](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/kpRSCH7ALLcb6ucWM/say-not-complexity)).
So imagine having something like [the transporter in _Star Trek_](https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Transporter), but you re-materialize with the body of someone else, rather than your original body—a little booth I could walk in, dissolve in a tingly glowy special effect for a few seconds, and walk out looking like (say) [Nana Visitor (circa 1998)](https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Kay_Eaton?file=Kay_Eaton.jpg). (In the folklore of [female-transformation erotica](/2016/Oct/exactly-what-it-says-on-the-tin/), this machine is often called the ["morphic adaptation unit"](https://www.cyoc.net/interactives/chapter_115321.html).)
You might think this is "unfair": some women—about 7 per 1000—are 5′11″, and we don't want to say they're somehow _less female_ on that account, so why can't I keep my height? The problem is that if we refuse to adjust for every trait for which the female and male distributions overlap (on the grounds that _some_ women have the same trait value as my male self), we don't end up with a result from the female distribution.
-The typical point in a high-dimensional distribution is _not_ typical along each dimension individually. [In 100 flips of a biased coin](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2019/05/the-typical-set/) that lands Heads 0.6 of the time, the _single_ most likely sequence is 100 Heads, but there's only one of those and you're _vanishingly_ unlikely to actually see it. The [sequences you'll actually observe will have close to 60 Heads](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asymptotic_equipartition_property). Each such sequence is individually less probable than the all-Heads sequence, but there are vastly more of them. Similarly, [most of the probability-mass of a high-dimensional multivariate normal distribution is concentrated in a thin "shell" some distance away from the mode](https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2011/09/01/multivariate-normal-shell/), for the same reason. (The _same_ reason: the binomial distribution converges to the normal in the limit of large _n_.)
+<a id="typical-point"></a>The typical point in a high-dimensional distribution is _not_ typical along each dimension individually. [In 100 flips of a biased coin](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2019/05/the-typical-set/) that lands Heads 0.6 of the time, the _single_ most likely sequence is 100 Heads, but there's only one of those and you're _vanishingly_ unlikely to actually see it. The [sequences you'll actually observe will have close to 60 Heads](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asymptotic_equipartition_property). Each such sequence is individually less probable than the all-Heads sequence, but there are vastly more of them. Similarly, [most of the probability-mass of a high-dimensional multivariate normal distribution is concentrated in a thin "shell" some distance away from the mode](https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2011/09/01/multivariate-normal-shell/), for the same reason. (The _same_ reason: the binomial distribution converges to the normal in the limit of large _n_.)
Statistical sex differences are like flipping two different collections of coins with different biases, where the coins represent various traits. Learning the outcome of any individual flip, doesn't tell you which set that coin came from, but [if we look at the aggregation of many flips, we can get _godlike_ confidence](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cu7YY7WdgJBs3DpmJ/the-univariate-fallacy-1) as to which collection we're looking at.
A single-variable measurement like height is like a single coin: unless the coin is _very_ biased, one flip can't tell you much about the bias. But there are lots of things about people for which it's not that they can't be measured, but that the measurements require _more than one number_—which correspondingly offer more information about the distribution generating them.
-And knowledge about the distribution is genuinely informative. Occasionally you hear progressive-minded people dismiss and disdain simpleminded transphobes who believe that chromosomes determine sex, when actually, most people haven't been karyotyped and don't _know_ what chromosomes they have. (Um, with respect to some sense of "know" that doesn't care how unsurprised I was that my 23andMe results came back with a _Y_ and would have bet on it at very generous odds.)
+<a id="chromosomes"></a>And knowledge about the distribution is genuinely informative. Occasionally you hear progressive-minded people dismiss and disdain simpleminded transphobes who believe that chromosomes determine sex, when actually, most people haven't been karyotyped and don't _know_ what chromosomes they have. (Um, with respect to some sense of the word "know" that doesn't care how unsurprised I was that my [23andMe](http://23andme.com/) results came back with a _Y_ and that I would have happily bet on this at extremely generous odds.)
Certainly, I agree that almost no one interacts with sex chromosomes on a day-to-day basis; no one even knew that sex chromosomes _existed_ before 1905. [(Co-discovered by a woman!)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nettie_Stevens) But the function of [intensional definitions](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HsznWM9A7NiuGsp28/extensions-and-intensions) in human natural language isn't to exhaustively [pinpoint](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3FoMuCLqZggTxoC3S/logical-pinpointing) a concept in the detail it would be implemented in an AI's executing code, but rather to provide a "treasure map" sufficient for a listener to pick out the corresponding concept in their own world-model: that's why [Diogenes exhibiting a plucked chicken in response to Plato's definition of a human as a "featherless biped"](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jMTbQj9XB5ah2maup/similarity-clusters) seems like a cheap "gotcha"—we all instantly know that's not what Plato meant. ["The challenge is figuring out which things are similar to each other—which things are clustered together—and sometimes, which things have a common cause."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/d5NyJ2Lf6N22AD9PB/where-to-draw-the-boundary) But sex chromosomes, and to a large extent specifically the [SRY gene](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Testis-determining_factor) located on the Y chromosome, _are_ such a common cause—the root of the [causal graph](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/hzuSDMx7pd2uxFc5w/causal-diagrams-and-causal-models) underlying all _other_ sex differences. A smart natural philosopher living _before_ 1905, knowing about all the various observed differences between women and men, might have guessed at the existence of some molecular mechanism of sex determination, and been _right_. By the "treasure map" standard, "XX is female; XY is male" is a pretty _well-performing_ definition—if you're looking for a [_simple_ membership test](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/edEXi4SpkXfvaX42j/schelling-categories-and-simple-membership-tests) that's entangled with a lot of information about the many intricate ways in which females and males statistically differ.
From context, it seems like the idea was targeted at men who disdain women as a mysterious Other—but the same moral applies to men who are in ideologically-motivated denial about how male-typical they are, and whether this has implications. [At the time, I certainly didn't want to think of myself _as a man_.](https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/FBgozHEv7J72NCEPB/my-way#comment-7ZwECTPFTLBpytj7b) And yet ...
-For example. When I read things from the [systematizing–empathizing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empathising%E2%80%93systemising_theory)/"men are interested in things, women are interested in people" line of research—which, to be clear that you know that I know, is [only a mere statistical difference at a mere Cohen's _d_ ≈ 0.93](http://unremediatedgender.space/papers/su_et_al-men_and_things_women_and_people.pdf), not an absolute like genitals or chromosomes—my instinctive reaction is, "But, but, that's not _fair_. People _are_ systems, because _everything_ is a system. [What kind of a lame power is empathy, anyway?](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WhatKindOfLamePowerIsHeartAnyway)"
+For example. When I read things from the [systematizing–empathizing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empathising%E2%80%93systemising_theory)/"men are interested in things, women are interested in people" line of research—which, to be clear that you know that I know, is [only a mere statistical difference at a mere Cohen's _d_ ≈ 0.93](/papers/su_et_al-men_and_things_women_and_people.pdf), not an absolute like genitals or chromosomes—my instinctive reaction is, "But, but, that's not _fair_. People _are_ systems, because _everything_ is a system. [What kind of a lame power is empathy, anyway?](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WhatKindOfLamePowerIsHeartAnyway)"
[But the map is not the territory](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/np3tP49caG4uFLRbS/the-quotation-is-not-the-referent). We don't have unmediated access to reality beyond [the Veil of Maya](https://web.archive.org/web/20020606121040/http://singinst.org/GISAI/mind/consensus.html); system-ness in the empathizing/systematizing sense is a feature of our _models_ of the world, not the world itself.
_Alright_. So _in principle_, you could imagine having a PersonApp that maps me to a point in the female region of configuration space in some appropriately structure-preserving way, to compute my female analogue who is as authentically _me_ as possible while also being authentically female, down to her pelvis shape, and the proportion of gray matter in her posterior lateral orbitofrontal cortex, and—the love of a woman for a man. What is she like, concretely? Do I know how to imagine that?
-Or if I can imagine it, can I _describe_ it in this blog post? I am presently sorrowful that [(following John Holt)](https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/S8ysxzgraSeuBXnpk/rationality-quotes-july-2009/comment/DtyDzN5etD4woXtFM) we all know more than we can say. I have mental models of people, and the models get queried for predictions in the course of planning my social behavior, but I don't have introspective access to the differences between models. It's easier to imagine people in hypothetical situations and say things like, "That doesn't sound like something she'd _do_, but _he_ would" (and be correct), than to say exactly it is about her character and his that generated these predictions, such that [my words would paint a picture in your head](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/YF9HB6cWCJrDK5pBM/words-as-mental-paintbrush-handles) that would let you make your own predictions about her and him without having met them—just like how you're better at recognizing someone's face, than at describing their face in words in enough detail for an artist to draw a portrait.
+Or if I can imagine it, can I _describe_ it in this blog post? I am presently sorrowful that [(following John Holt)](https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/S8ysxzgraSeuBXnpk/rationality-quotes-july-2009/comment/DtyDzN5etD4woXtFM) we all know more than we can say. I have mental models of people, and the models get queried for predictions in the course of planning my social behavior, but I don't have introspective access to the differences between models. It's easier to imagine people in hypothetical situations and say things like, "That doesn't sound like something she'd _do_, but _he_ would" (and be correct), than to say exactly what it is about her character and his that generated these predictions, such that [my words would paint a picture in your head](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/YF9HB6cWCJrDK5pBM/words-as-mental-paintbrush-handles) that would let you make your own predictions about her and him without having met them—just like how you're better at recognizing someone's face, than at describing their face in words in enough detail for an artist to draw a portrait.
As a _first-order approximation_, I do have a sister. I think the family resemblance between us is stronger than with either parent. We're about equally intelligent—OK, she's probably smarter than me; [the SAT is pretty](https://www.gwern.net/docs/iq/2004-frey.pdf) [_g_-loaded](/2020/Apr/book-review-human-diversity/#the-length-of-a-hyperellipsoid) and her 1580 (out of 1600) trounces my 2180 (on [the out-of-2400 scale used between 2005 and 2016](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAT#2005_changes,_including_a_new_2400-point_score), such that 2180 proportionally scales down to 1453 out of 1600). Our dark hair curls into helices with similar radius. We even have similar mannerisms, I think? She's 5′6½″.
Okay. Having supplied just enough language to _start_ to talk about what it would even mean to actually become female—is that what I _want_?
-I've just explained that, _in principle_, it could be done, so you might think there's no _conceptual_ problem with the idea of changing sex, in the same sense that there's nothing _conceptually_ wrong with Jules Verne's [pair](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_the_Earth_to_the_Moon) of [novels](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Around_the_Moon) about flying around the moon. There are lots of technical rocket-science details that Verne didn't and couldn't have known about in the 1860s, but the _basic idea_ was sound, and [actually achieved a hundred years later](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_8). So why is it in any way is it _relevant_ that making the magical transformation fantasy real would be technically complicated?
+I've just explained that, _in principle_, it could be done, so you might think there's no _conceptual_ problem with the idea of changing sex, in the same sense that there's nothing _conceptually_ wrong with Jules Verne's [pair](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_the_Earth_to_the_Moon) of [novels](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Around_the_Moon) about flying around the moon. There are lots of technical rocket-science details that Verne didn't and couldn't have known about in the 1860s, but the _basic idea_ was sound, and [actually achieved a hundred years later](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_8). So why is it in any way _relevant_ that making the magical transformation fantasy real would be technically complicated?
It's relevant insofar as the technical details change your evaluation of the desirability of _what_ is to be accomplished, which can differ from [what sounds like good news in the moment of first hearing about the idea](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pK4HTxuv6mftHXWC3/prolegomena-to-a-theory-of-fun).
What if I can't just "try" it? What if the machine can only be used once? Or (my preference) if some deep "brain sex" transformation only works once, even if a more superficial motor remapping is easy to do or re-do? Come up with whatever frame story you want for this: maybe the machine costs my life savings just to rent for two minutes, or maybe the transformation process is ever-so-slightly imperfect, such that you can't re-transform someone who's already been transformed once, like a photocopy being a perfectly acceptable substitute for an original document, but photocopies-of-photocopies rapidly losing quality.
-In that case, if I have to choose ... I _don't_ think I want to be Actually Female? I _like_ who I am on the inside, and don't need to change it. I don't _want_ to stop loving challenges and points—or women!—in the way that I do. And if I don't know enough neuroscience to have an _informed_ preference about the ratio of gray to white matter in my posterior lateral orbitofrontal cortex, I'm sure it's _probably fine_.
+<a id="if-i-have-to-choose"></a>In that case, if I have to choose ... I _don't_ think I want to be Actually Female? I _like_ who I am on the inside, and don't need to change it. I don't _want_ to stop loving challenges and points—or women!—in the way that I do. And if I don't know enough neuroscience to have an _informed_ preference about the ratio of gray to white matter in my posterior lateral orbitofrontal cortex, I'm sure it's _probably fine_.
At the same time, the idea of having a female body still seems like _the most appealing thing in the world_. If artificial superintelligence gives me BodyApp to play with for a subjective year and [tiles the _rest_ of our future lightcone with paperclips](https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/paperclip-maximizer), that's _fine_; I will die _happy_.
(I guess I can't evade responsibility for the fact that I am, in fact, blogging about this.)
-A clue: when I'm masturbating, and imagining all the forms I would take if the magical transformation technology were real (the frame story can vary, but the basic idea is always the same), I don't think I'm very _good_ at first-person visualization? The _content_ of the fantasy is about _me_ being a woman (I mean, having a woman's body), but the associated mental imagery mostly isn't the first-person perspective I would actually experience if the fantasy were real; I think I'm mostly imagining a specific woman (which one, varies a lot) as from the outside, admiring her face, and her voice, and her breasts, but somehow wanting the soul behind those eyes to be _me_. Wanting _my_ body to be shaped like _that_, to be in control of that avatar of beauty—not even to _do_ anything overtly "sexy" in particular, but just to exist like that.
+A clue: when I'm masturbating, and imagining all the forms I would take if the magical transformation technology were real (the frame story can vary, but the basic idea is always the same), I don't think I'm very _good_ at first-person visualization? The _content_ of the fantasy is about _me_ being a woman (I mean, having a woman's body), but the associated mental imagery mostly isn't the first-person perspective I would actually experience if the fantasy were real; I think I'm mostly imagining a specific woman (which one, varies a lot) as from the outside, admiring her face, and her voice, and her breasts, but somehow wanting the soul behind those eyes to be _me_. Wanting _my_ body to be shaped like _that_, to be in control of that avatar of beauty—not even necessarily to _do_ anything overtly "sexy" in particular, but just to exist like that.
If the magical transformation technology were real, I would want a full-length mirror. (And in the real world, I would probably crossdress a _lot_ more often, if I could pass to myself in the mirror. My face ruins it and makeup doesn't help.)
Recently I had an occasion [(don't ask)](https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/uwBKaeQzsvkcErmBm/ialdabaoth-is-banned/comment/PqZ2NFfj2b2dJoZ9N) to look up if there was a word for having a statue fetish. Turns out it's called _agalmatophilia_, [defined by _Wikipedia_ as](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agalmatophilia) "sexual attraction to a statue, doll, mannequin or other similar figurative object", which "may include a desire for actual sexual contact with the object, a fantasy of having sexual (or non-sexual) encounters with an animate or inanimate instance of the preferred object, the act of watching encounters between such objects, or"—_wait for it_ ... "sexual pleasure gained from thoughts of being transformed or transforming another into the preferred object." I don't think the _Wikipedia_ editor who wrote that last phrase was being a shill for the general erotic-target-location-error hypothesis because it has political implications; I think "among guys who are sexually interested in _X_, some fraction of them want to be _X_" is just _something you notice_ when you honestly look at the world of guys who are sexually interested in arbitrary _X_.
-And, and—I've never told anyone this and have barely thought about it in years, but while I'm blogging about all this anyway—I have a few _vague_ memories from _early_ teenagerhood of having transformation fantasies about things other than women.. Like wondering (while masturbating) what it would like to be a dog, or a horse, or a marble statue of a woman. Anyway, I lost interest in those before too long, but I think this vague trace-of-a-memory is evidence for the thing going on with me being an underlying erotic-target-location-error-like predisposition rather than an underlying intersex condition.
+And, and—I've never told anyone this and have barely thought about it in years, but while I'm blogging about all this anyway—I have a few _vague_ memories from _early_ teenagerhood of having transformation fantasies about things other than women. Like wondering (while masturbating) what it would like to be a dog, or a horse, or a marble statue of a woman. Anyway, I lost interest in those before too long, but I think this vague trace-of-a-memory is evidence for the thing going on with me being an underlying erotic-target-location-error-like predisposition rather than an underlying intersex condition.
I don't _know_ the details of what this "erotic target location error" thing is supposed to _be_, exactly—and would expect my beliefs to change a lot if _anyone_ knew the details and could explain them to me—but I think _some story in this general vicinity_ has to be the real explanation of what's going on with me. How _else_ do you make sense of an otherwise apparently normal biological male (whose physical and psychological traits seem to be basically in the male normal range, even if he's [one of those sensitive bookish males](/2020/Sep/link-wells-for-boys/) rather than being "macho") having the _conjunction_ of the beautiful pure sacred self-identity thing _and_, specifically, erotic female-transformation fantasies of the kind I've described?
-Am I supposed to claim to be a lesbian trapped inside a man's body? That I _am_ neurologically female in some real sense, and that's the true cause of my beautiful pure sacred self-identity thing?
+<a id="am-i-supposed-to-claim"></a>Am I supposed to claim to be a lesbian trapped inside a man's body? That I _am_ neurologically female in some real sense, and that's the true cause of my beautiful pure sacred self-identity thing?
_Maybe_ that could be spun to seem superficially plausible to those who know me casually, but I don't know how to square that account with the _details_ of my inner life (including the details that I wouldn't blog about if I didn't have to). I think if you used magical transformation technology to put an actual lesbian in a copy of my body, I can imagine her/him having [Body Horror](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BodyHorror) at her/his alien new form and wish to be restored to her/his original body on _that_ account, and maybe her/his identification with her/his former sex ("gender") would look _sort of_ like my beautiful pure sacred self-identity thing (if you squint).
My [laser beard removal sessions](/tag/lasers/) were ... arguably a waste of money, since I still have to shave even after 13 treatments?—but it at least got the density of my ugly–gross facial hair down a bit. Trying it was definitely a _smart move_ given what I knew at the time, and I _just might_ be rich enough and disgusted-by-facial-hair enough to go back for more density-reduction. (Electrolysis gets better results than laser, but it's more expensive and a lot more painful.)
-People get cosmetic surgery sometimes for non-sex-change-related reasons. I guess if I grew a little braver and a little more desperate, I could imagine wanting to research if and how "mild" facial feminization surgery is a thing—just, selfishly, to be happier with my reflection. (Probably a _smarter move_ to check out [movie-grade latex masks](https://www.creafx.com/en/special-make-up-effects/taylor-silicone-mask/) first, to see if it's at all possible to attain the bliss of passing in the mirror _without_ taking a knife to my one and only real-life face.)
+<a id="movie-grade-mask"></a>People get cosmetic surgery sometimes for non-sex-change-related reasons. I guess if I grew a little braver and a little more desperate, I could imagine wanting to research if and how "mild" facial feminization surgery is a thing—just, selfishly, to be happier with my reflection. (Probably a _smarter move_ to check out [movie-grade latex masks](https://www.creafx.com/en/special-make-up-effects/taylor-silicone-mask/) first, to see if it's at all possible to attain the bliss of passing in the mirror _without_ taking a knife to my one and only real-life face.)
And I should probably look into [figuring out if there's anything to be done](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pattern_hair_loss#Treatment) for my hairline before it gets any worse?
I now realize that the correct answer to [the question](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vjmw8tW6wZAtNJMKo/which-parts-are-me) is—_yes!_ Yes, it's cheating! Category-membership claims of the form "X is a Y" [represent hidden probabilistic inferences](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3nxs2WYDGzJbzcLMp/words-as-hidden-inferences); inferring that entity X is a member of category Y means [using observations about X to decide to use knowledge about members of Y to make predictions about features of X that you haven't observed yet](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gDWvLicHhcMfGmwaK/conditional-independence-and-naive-bayes). But this AI trick can only _work_ if the entities you've assigned to category Y are _actually_ similar in the real world—if they form a tight cluster in configuration space, such that using the center of the cluster to make predictions about unobserved features gets you _close_ to the right answer, on average.
-The rules don't change when the entity X happens to be "my female analogue" and the category Y happens to be "me". The ordinary concept of "personal identity" tracks how the high-level features of individual human organisms are stable over time. You're going to want to model me-on-Monday and me-on-Thursday as "the same" person even if my Thursday-self woke up on the wrong side of bed and has three whole days of new memories. When interacting with my Thursday-self, you're going to be using your existing mental model of me, plus a diff for "He's grumpy" and "Haven't seen him in three days"—but that's a _very small_ diff, compared to the diff between me and some other specific person you know, or the diff between me and a generic human who you don't know.
+<a id="personal-identity"></a>The rules don't change when the entity X happens to be "my female analogue" and the category Y happens to be "me". The ordinary concept of "personal identity" tracks how the high-level features of individual human organisms are stable over time. You're going to want to model me-on-Monday and me-on-Thursday as "the same" person even if my Thursday-self woke up on the wrong side of bed and has three whole days of new memories. When interacting with my Thursday-self, you're going to be using your existing mental model of me, plus a diff for "He's grumpy" and "Haven't seen him in three days"—but that's a _very small_ diff, compared to the diff between me and some other specific person you know, or the diff between me and a generic human who you don't know.
In everyday life, we're almost never in doubt as to which entities we want to consider "the same" person (like me-on-Monday and me-on-Thursday), but we can concoct science-fictional thought experiments that force [the Sorites problem](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sorites-paradox/) to come up. What if you could _interpolate_ between two people—construct a human with a personality "in between" yours and mine, that had both or some fraction of each of our memories? (You know, like [Tuvix](https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Tuvix_(episode)).) At what point on the spectrum would that person be me, or you, or both, or neither? (Derek Parfit has [a book](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reasons_and_Persons#Personal_identity) with lots of these.)
But what _constitutes_ doing right by women, depends on the actual facts of the matter about psychological sex differences—if you _assume_, based on empathic inference, that the target of your benevolence is just like you, you might end up taking actions that hurt rather than help them if you live in one of the possible worlds where they're _not_ just like you.
-The thing to be committed to is not any potentially flawed object-level ideology, like antisexism or Christianity, but [the features of human psychology that](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2017/03/dreaming-of-political-bayescraft/) make the object-level ideology _seem like a good idea_. [People can stand what is true, for we are already doing so.](https://www.readthesequences.com/You-Can-Face-Reality)
+The thing to be committed to is not any potentially flawed object-level ideology, like antisexism or Christianity, but [the features of human psychology that](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2017/03/dreaming-of-political-bayescraft/) make the object-level ideology _seem like a good idea_. That way, you can _update_ when the thing that initially seemed like a good idea turns out to be a _bad_ idea in light of new information about what was already the case the whole time. [People can stand what is true, for we are already doing so.](https://www.readthesequences.com/You-Can-Face-Reality)
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projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff